Dipping a toe into Marathi

After two years here, I will grudgingly admit my Hindi is quite up to par. I remember the exact moment I realised this - when I told a friend "tumhari marzi" - probably not a thing a tentative newbie would say. Apologies to anyone hoping to see me in a "Hindi theriyaadhu poda" t-shirt.

Luckily, the blog URL also works in Marathi. So that is my new project!

As someone already interested in languages, this is turning out to be a fun endeavour. It is handy to be able to peg new words/concepts to already known ones in other languages, while also being an intellectual exercise. In some respects it is more like Tamil (having an inclusive and exclusive "we"!) but in most, it is similar to Hindi and Sanskrit (most vocabulary words and unfortunately, gendered inanimate objects.) 

Learning Sanskrit has drawn my attention to things which native speakers probably don't even do consciously - for instance, systematically listing noun and pronoun cases (vibhaktis), and adjectives agreeing with the noun they are describing in gender and number. 

Knowing Hindi/Sanskrit should not give one a sense of complacency, however - there are differences just in the script. There is of course the delightful ळ which is new. There is also an "overloading" of च and झ - apart from the usual sounds they also sometimes denote tsa and zha (not to be confused with the Tamil ழ, a completely different sound) and it is not immediately clear which to use. (Sometimes it's different pronunciations in different forms of the same word, eg आमचा/आमची are aamtsa/aamchi!) These contribute to the quite distinct sound of Marathi, which I really enjoy.

Currently I am learning from an old-worldly little book to learn Marathi through English, and from YouTube videos - mainly Bharatiya Digital Party and its sister channels (helpfully subtitled). This is still mostly consumption, not creation - which is well suited to the intellectual exercise and my fear of making mistakes. However I will soon have to let go of that and just speak, and also learn to accept why some things are the way they are without a "good" reason. There may not always be a straight line from Proto-Indo-European to Sanskrit to Marathi. Languages are living entities with their idiosyncrasies and that is precisely the charm.

If any of you have learnt a language as an adult, and have tips to share, please do so!